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GIFs are everywhere. The short attention spans of the internet-going public combined with better network speeds and higher bandwith has made the GIF a perfect medium for conveying short bursts of information (that is, until HTML5 video catches on). It’s quite remarkable that this relatively ancient technology is fast becoming the preferred way of communicating short “videos” where sound is a non-essential factor.

Reddit-inspired imgur.com is considered the de facto standard for sharing non-personal images across the internet (Instagram owns the personal domain). The free account allows for 5MB uploads (recently changed form 2MB) and a paid account is currently at 10MB. GIFs however, are becoming larger and larger in size. These limits inspired the creation of minus.com, a service that boasts a limit of 15MB which is good enough for most GIFs that are created. The latter service, however, lacks in speed and comes equipped with a horrible mobile site that, if not changed, will bleed them users. Also-rans in the field also include PhotoBucket, ImageShack, and countless others that for one reason or the other (e.g., poor interfaces, disjointed user experience) are simply not options.

This is where Google+ and the now infamous googleusercontent.com domain comes in. The fledgling social network has attracted users (myself included) in a manner that may have been entirely unintended: large size image sharing. Built on the famed infrastructure of Google, Google+ stores its images on sub-domains of googleusercontent.com, which delivers images at a speed that blows out imgur.com and minus.com.

I did some benchmarking (non-scientific) using the siege command in Linux and it looks like I caught Imgur.com on a bad day, but nonetheless, the difference between Google+ and the rest is mind boggling. The following is a test against a GIF of 3.521 MB.

Recently I came across Pummelvision, which takes your photos from Flickr and other similar sites and creates a video out of them. Being a loyal SmugMug user for years, I was a bit disappointed that they hadn’t thought of SmugMug when making this app. So, I put my dev skills to test and came up with SmugMash:

You can choose to have all your SmugMug photos made into a video, or you can select a gallery. Until Pummelvision decides to add SmugMug, at least we got something. Here’s an example of a video made through this app. If you have support issues, you can find me on Twitter

The job here is to highlight unread or new comments that a visitor to your site has not seen. This is especially helpful when you have a blog with lots of threaded comments where it becomes difficult for a reader to get a grip on just where they should look to read new comments. This method can work anywhere, not just in WordPress, but this example is geared towards the Disqus WordPress Plugin. Once you install the plugin, find the comments.php file located inside the plugin folder, usually something like wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/comments.php.

All we’re doing is setting a cookie storing the largest read disqus comment id per post in the user’s browser. If a comment id smaller than it is encountered, it’s left alone. If a bigger one is encountered, then we use jQuery’s parent() and css() functions to add some styling to the comment. You can change that line as you desire. You can see this feature implemented on Raptors Republic

It’s basically one index.php script which does everything. The SQL script is also in there, all you’ll need to do is put it on a PHP enabled server somewhere and change the ez_sql.php file to point to the right database.